China syndrome -- China not serious about resolving, sabre-rattling

October 26, 2009

By Dr Gautam Sen
Organizer Weekly (India)
November 1, 2009 Edition

China is not serious at all about resolving the
border dispute with India because that will upset
the Pakistanis. This is exactly the same reason
why Pakistan will never allow resolution of their
dispute over Kashmir. If either dispute ended
Indian forces would only have to deal with one
major border threat and massive redeployment of Indian forces would occur.

Why China is saber rattling is not entirely
clear. But Indians applying supposed
reasonableness and perspective in response to
this belligerence is foolish. China is a bully
and it has been their standard Han technique when
dealing with all barbarians, which is how they
view peoples beyond their own borders. Indians
must first of all purge their liberal instincts,
the only attribute of their crafty colonial
masters they managed to retain instead of the
whole panoply of methods and gestures that should
have included complete Curzonian cynicism and a
healthy capacity to promise severe retaliation when threatened by an adversary.

Discussing China in a historical vacuum is quite
typical of Indian analysts and lots of footnotes
in a long recent book on the subject make no
difference to the argument. But when the
conclusion begins to favour Chinese claims
against India, one wonders exactly what is going
on. Of course, China has control over one leading
southern newspaper and plenty of Indian
parliamentarians swear allegiance to it. These
venal, lowly Indian communists also supported
Yahya Khan and his genocide in East Pakistan in
order to oppose alleged Indian hegemonism. There
will come a time, during a major national crisis,
when they will simply be taken from their beds by
Indias armed forces and shot, much like how that
great communist/patriot Joseph Stalin treated traitors.

The first thing our half-wit Indian geniuses must
remember is that all border disputes with China
derive from its illegal occupation of Tibet and
the prolonged brutal subjugation of its people.
Talking about the Indo-Tibetan border without
recognising the imperative need to first end
Chinas occupation and demographic war against
the Tibetan people is a non-starter.

Besides, China is not serious at all about
resolving the border dispute with India because
that will upset the Pakistanis. This is exactly
the same reason why Pakistan will never allow
resolution of their dispute over Kashmir. If
either dispute ended Indian forces would only
have to deal with one major border threat and
massive redeployment of Indian forces would
occur. That is something neither China nor
Pakistan would be stupid enough to facilitate.
And each party has an understanding with the
other that the persistence of the two claims
against India keep Indian forces divided and make
having to fight a war simultaneously against both
antagonists a serious disadvantage. Do you think
the Chinese want India to be able to move
800,000+ forces and huge air power into
Arunachal, etc. from the J&K front? Indians may
be too stupid to notice this blinding rationale
for keeping the disputes alive, but the Chinese certainly have not been.

China is sabre-rattling because Pakistan feels
vulnerable at present (given its own
well-deserved domestic preoccupations) and a
Chinese threat to India means that Indian forces
will have to factor in the two-front scenario,
which is what prompted Indias nuclear tests in
1998. Such Chinese threats also allow Pakistan to
send jehadis into India in the way they did in
26/11. Indians are hesitant to retaliate if
Chinese forces are expected to attack India while
it is busy neutering jehadis inside Pakistan. Of
course, these jehadis are getting full logistical
and intelligence backing from China in return for
their all-weather friendship and the blank cheque
offered to China by Pakistan recently.

But not all is lost for India since its current
ruling elites (including former members of the
erstwhile NDA) and the media regard Narendra Modi
as their biggest problem. Indeed they have
exonerated the jehadi, Ishrat Jehan and her
Pakistani associates in an attempt to unseat Modi
and legitimate jehadi bomb attacks against a
Gujarat that is by implication a fascist
political dispensation. Jehadis justify attacks
all over India by referring to a fictitious
genocide in Gujarat and quote people like Teesta
Setalvad, NDTV, the Times of India, the wretched
Arundhati Roy, Amartya Sen, etc. etc. The subtext
is that it is OK to kill these Gujaratis since
they vote for the fascist Modi. Most interesting
of all is that each Islamist terror attack
further consolidates and mobilises an anxious
Islamic vote across in India in favour of the
political parties that have traditionally depended on it.

A strategically alert Indian government would
instigate media speculation that if Pakistan
launches a nuclear assault, something it
constantly threatens to do if Indian forces
merely cross the border to stop jehadis attacking
Indian territory, it will deal with real owners
and financiers of Pakistans nuclear assets. This
is all about dire threats, uncertainty and how a
country once devastated by a nuclear first strike
might behave irrationally (do read the superb
Thomas Schelling on this subject) when it
retaliates with its surviving second strike.
India should allow speculation that its second
strike retaliation will be against Beijing,
Shanghai, Chengdu, Riyadh, Mecca and Medina (the
real owners of Pakistans nuclear assets). And
the GoI itself should maintain a pointedly
studious silence when this public speculation and
purposive leaks are discussed in the media. But I
suppose Modi is such a distraction for many
secular Indians, who prefer Musharaff, the author
of Kargil and the torture and murder of Lt. Kalia to him!